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Chapter 203 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”
🕑 Added 2024-08-28 15:40:58 +0000 UTCI have been just observing my latest playroom after having finished it nearly three weeks ago. It was simply so relaxing to view. How the floating islands slowly moved, and how the rivers meandered through the sky, slowly going downwards.
Life here seems to be growing at an exponential rate, as there are so many base resources for life to keep growing. I even brought some of the plants from my ocean world that grew underneath its continents, changed them a little bit so they could live in freshwater, and put them into the water network. There, they quickly found the water spheres underneath the floating islands, where they quite happily started to spread.
This brought other plant life there, and because of that, smaller fish started to live there too. It didn't take long for bigger fish that hunted smaller fish to find their way there as well. While the number of creatures was still low, I could already see the future of large numbers of fish that would travel between floating islands and the land below, while flyers swooped into the circular rivers to catch fish.
I believe this, in the future, might be my most populous playroom, although my floors will continue to grow bigger, so that might not be technically true. Now, it was also time to stop just admiring my new playroom and continue to push forward. The dungeon rooms on the 41st floor were done as well, but I will wait a while longer to open them up. While adventurers were making good progress, they were still messing around on the 40th floor.
It was strange as I collected mana and prepared for my breakthrough, as it was now commonplace for me to hide the fluctuations and vibrations my breakthrough would cause so no one would actually know when I was advancing.
It was trivial to collect mana, and it was still weird to think about my ancestral memories where I saw dungeons taking years to collect mana to advance to the next floor. I wonder if I will ever make it to that point, but even if I do, it doesn’t matter. I have so much to entertain myself with all the floors I have created.
Before I advanced, there was the question of what the floor guardian would be. While I could simply think of it during my advancement, it was now clear to me that the longer I took during an advancement, the longer I would remain asleep, which was something I couldn’t afford as who knew what trouble might come during that time. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have any good ideas, so I just looked around in my latest playroom for some creature that could fit the bill.
They were all kind of too weak for this floor, but then I saw an interesting creature. It was still quite standard, but this mountain goat had developed an interesting skill: it could jump in the air. I think the adventurers called it double jumping, but I was certain it would eventually lead to these mountain goats being able to traverse the sky itself. In their young, I could already see this skill integrating with their bodies.
Yes, I think I can increase the strength of this pattern enough. I should also make an interesting floor guardian room so it could take advantage of this skill a bit more.
When I was done with the guardian room, I entered my breakthrough and enjoyed the feeling that came with it. It was trivially easy and fast to finish the floor guardian and its room, and quickly I moved on to the skills section of the advancement.
The choice was easy right now as I simply picked Pattern Strengthening and advanced it to S rank. I had a bit of mana left, so I put the rest into Creature Making. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to advance from its current rank.
Once again, I was stronger in every aspect, and after quickly reestablishing control over my dungeon, making sure that nothing was wrong, I immediately started to work on the 42nd floor, already excited about what the playroom was going to be.
In the Academy, as of late, there has been a new branch of science called Arcanopaleontology where they find old remains of creatures long dead and use magic to bring them back to life. With this, I could add even more patterns to my pattern library.
What was even more fascinating was that they had counterparts that still lived to this day. Some of them were called dinosaurs, but there were other classifications as well. They were really strong creatures, although quite obviously a bit unsuited for the environment of this current world.
Fortunately, I knew what kind of environment they would need, and I could recreate their world in one of my playrooms. In fact, I was going to do this with the next one and fill it with creatures who should have been long dead.
The people of the Academy suspect that they are from the First Age, the one that lasted the longest—most likely a few billion years, which is a crazy amount of time. Compared to that, I’m barely a newborn, but I would kinda like to see what I would be like after living for so long.
Unfortunately, I don’t know if I can because of how this world’s advancement works. Would I still be the same after I bring about the new age of this world? Hopefully, I will get the answers to those questions, and if I don’t like the answers, figure out something different.
As I was expanding my 42nd floor, I was going through all of my dungeon rules and upgrading the ones I needed to make stronger. My sub-dungeons were also doing quite well, although I do wish I had more that I could put into every floor. Perhaps this would be the skill that I advance next.
They were a great resource for my creatures to continue to advance. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make them platinum rank just yet, but when I finally reached the end of the 50th floor, an entirely new world should open up to me.
In the dungeon rooms, however, more and more platinum ranks were showing up, and more adventurers were advancing to platinum rank. It was so fascinating to watch them start to use their new or upgraded talents and, of course, their greater overall power.
It was also a bit troublesome, as those floors really weren’t meant for platinum ranks. What I wasn’t going to do was make the floors harder just because of the increase in platinum ranks. It would be unfair to the gold ranks, and if they wanted to advance like that, it was their choice. I just hope I will get to platinum rank quick enough so I can give them a proper challenge as well.
It's still unfortunate that they will ruin the balance of the gold floors for some time, but the same thing happened on the silver floors where gold ranks ruined the balance for quite a while. But now things have stabilized, and the silver floors are once again for silver ranks to enjoy and train in. Eventually, this will also happen to the gold-rank floors, but it will take some time.
Other than that, everything seems to be going quite well, and I think with the speed I am advancing, I can wait until the 51st floor to make the rank 5 playroom, which would be nice. But I think I will need to make a rank 4 playroom in the next couple of floors.
It has taken quite a while, but the rank 3 floor, where mainly platinum ranks are, is also slowly starting to develop the king behavior from the earlier floors, where one singular individual becomes powerful enough to control others and a large portion of land around itself.
This playroom is mainly the reason why I'm generating so much mana, as it by itself is worth about one-third of my entire mana generation. It is also showing me that the platinum floors are going to require a lot of mana upkeep, but thanks to the many platinum creatures I have, I should be able to handle it. However, I should start making more floors meant for platinums.
Comments
Zarik0
Picturing the future of the ecosystem and diversity of it in his last room with the circular river crossing all over the sky and with floating island is just simply amazing, imaginative idea get my big thumb up for this one :P
Baron of Awesome
I’m half convinced that the outside world is just a really big dungeon.
Gordon
Tftc
Hayden Lux
His advancement playrooms seem to mimic the world itself on a smaller scale with certain factions coming to dominate the world before fighting once again once a new playroom or age opens up. So the question is, is the advancement just for the Gods/Watchers entertainment since the stagent world is boring or like him is there the fear of an external threat driving the ages/advancement? We have not heard anything about an interdimensional invasion or war but aside from entertainment or an external threat nothing else jumps out at me as a driving reason behind the age system.
